A man walks into a bar…

One hundred years on, at Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre, two writers have found a new way to tell an old joke. The old joke is ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, a comedy in three acts by John Millington Synge, first staged in 1907. A man walks into a bar (a village shebeen), confesses to having killed his father, and is acclaimed a hero – until his father catches up with him

The Playboy is “the great play of Irish literature”, says Anthony Roche, professor at the University College Dublin School of English and an expert on Synge. It has survived both riots and neglect, and the demands of styles ranging from the sombre to the farcical. Written in a distinctive Hiberno-English idiom, it has been translated into Irish, stage-Oirish, West Indian creole and, last year, Mandarin. Now, in a new twist, it has been rewritten to recast the central role of Christy Mahon, the would-be murderer, as a Nigerian asylum seeker, and to transfer the location from a rural shebeen to a suburban bar somewhere off the M50. But will it still be funny?

The men responsible are an Irish Booker Prize winner and a Nigerian theatre director. Roddy Doyle doesn’t give interviews – he believes that if he agrees to one, he’ll never be able to stop. (He has said that much to this reporter – a technical infringement of his policy, perhaps.) His co-author, Bisi Adigun, on the other hand, has no desire whatsoever to stop. Assertive, gregarious, and voluble, Adigun talks passionately about his integration into Irish society and culture in the 12 years he has been here.

For Adigun, the Irish sense of humour was one of the most difficult hurdles.

“I taught myself how to laugh at Irish jokes,” he says.

“Comedy – as against tragedy – is very difficult to assess, because you must understand the cultural innuendo that informs it.”

Early in his time in Ireland, Adigun went to see the acclaimed Druid Theatre Company production of Martin McDonagh’s scabrous comedy, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1). He was the only person not laughing. The laughter around him was at the expense of the “powerless, senile old woman” at the heart of the play; for Adigun, to laugh at an old woman was culturally taboo. Assessing Irish culture more generally, he couldn’t quite see what was so funny about farting or falling down drunk, either.

A turning point came after Ireland’s 2002 Saipan World Cup debacle. Adigun was shopping on Grafton Street and came across a T-shirt with the logo: “Roy Keane’s Apology in Japanese”. Under that was a line of Japanese characters. At the bottom, it said: “If you don’t read Japanese, tilt your head to the right.” He tilted his head, and the Japanese characters, now on their side, read: “Go Fuck Yourself”. He bought the T-shirt (2).

There was another turning point more recently.

“The best thing that happened to me in this country so far was going on Ryan Tubridy to talk about Peig Sayers,” he says (3).

“When I told my wife what I was going to be talking about, she burst out laughing. So I said, right, I’m not talking with you about this. I just read it, on my own, and then went into the studio to talk about it. I went in cold turkey, no baggage.

“I felt, for the first time, that I came face to face with Irish culture. The language. The poetry. The communality. It was like a revelation.”

Cynics out there might think that Adigun’s response to Peig was overly informed by his traditional respect for the elderly. In any case, he says he had a similar reaction to The Playboy, yet with an edge to it.

“Playboy stood out for me. It occurred to me that Christy Mahon (the eponymous Playboy) is a refugee – a fugitive. The father is an oppressor. I look at the father, Old Mahon, as the country, that doesn’t let you breathe, so you get out.

“Mahon has been limited by his father. Society limits you. You have to rise above those limits. What Christy is looking for is for people to look at him as a human being.”

Adigun himself did not seek asylum in Ireland.

“I consider myself someone who has broadened his horizons and travelled. I wasn’t running from anything in Nigeria.”

But he is sympathetic to those who have, and saw in The Playboy a tale of how asylum seekers must engage with their new environment.

“You can actually show a scar – if there’s no good story to back that scar up, forget it.

“The power to fabricate stories, tell them convincingly or even exaggerate them are all important skills for many to have, in order to strengthen their asylum applications.

“Is that not what Christy did? Because Christy Mahon reinvents himself, he is accorded the respect he truly deserves for the first time in his entire life...

“This is what every asylum seeker does.

“The way I look at life is, human beings will naturally go to where they think their life will be better. How you get there is your own problem.”

So is this version of Playboy strictly for the bleeding-heart liberals? Jimmy Fay is directing the production.

“It’s more complicated than that,” he says. For Fay, the play is not about asylum seekers per se, but about the arrival of the stranger and how that shakes up the existing community – one which, in this new version, is “obsessed with violence, with Eurostar, and all that stuff.

“What it’s about is letting society see itself as something fresher, through somebody else’s eyes.

“I think it’s more looking at us. It is about the issue of our time – integration. Ireland is changing. You can’t make a bald statement – that this is a bad thing or this is a good thing.”

“Nobody in the play makes a comment in relation to blackness. The play doesn’t talk about that (asylum). It’s not pushing any political agenda.

“If there’s anything political about the play, it’s about shaking up a classic of Irish drama.”

The Playboy has been shaken up before – most notably, in Garry Hynes’s 1982 version with Druid, the company she helped found. (Hynes subsequently took a break from Druid in the 1990s to serve as artistic director of the Abbey.)

The play had gradually ossified over the preceding decades into a stage-Oirish comedy of drunken peasant idiocy; Hynes took it seriously, emphasising the poverty and violence of the environment. Druid had first tackled the play as their debut production, in 1975.

“I’d never seen the play before I actually did it,” says Hynes.

“I think we probably took it on its own terms, rather than having a sense that we were doing this sacred text of the Irish theatre. Given our lack of any real contact with professional theatre, we didn’t have that same weight of expectation or that same weight of tradition. In the course of rehearsals, we began to think to ourselves, my God, this is a great play.

“What can happen is there’s an acceptance, a convention about how to do big plays like that, and I think, in our innocence, probably without realising it, we broke through some of those conventions.”

Hynes has directed Playboy some five times.

“Like all great plays, it’s protean: every time I’ve done it, it’s like going to a new play, it doesn’t feel like I’ve done it before.”

And what of this great play being rewritten, relocated, recast?

“I think it’s great. I’m dying to see it. I think a great play like this is subject to all sorts of explorations.”

According to Anthony Roche, Synge himself was “very aware The Playboy would look different to different generations. In a letter to the Irish Times at the time of the 1907 production, Synge wrote: ‘There are many sides to the Playboy and you’ll only be seeing one or two sides of it this week’,” recalls Roche.

Garry Hynes, he says, “made it much more realistic and violent”, but “that in its own time became a cliché. There’s a limit to how far you can go in pursuit of realism.”

The Playboy was always intended “to provoke”, he says, but it has become so familiar that it has ceased to do so. So there’s an imperative to “find ways to do so again”.

For Roche, “the whole idea of a conservative production of a Synge play is counter-productive”. The Playboy, he says, “moves across borders very readily. It’s about transformation. It requires the opposite of ossification.”

A hundred years ago, Synge himself wrote of his play: “On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy, and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed… In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who has shut their lips on poetry.

“In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.”

He was writing, it seems, at the end of something. And yet Bisi Adigun turned to him at the beginning of something new.

“Ireland is no longer white, Catholic, settled Ireland,” says Adigun. “It is now diverse. New songs must be written. New dances must be done. New stories must be written, for those who are coming after us.”

So a new story can be built on a classic premise: a man walks into a bar. Only this time, the man, and the bar, look different. But how different are the people inside the bar?

Colin Murphy

Journalist and writer based in Dublin

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Original text in English

Colin Murphy is a journalist in Dublin. This production of Playboy of the Western World is currently running at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre

(1) Martin McDonagh, the English/Irish playwright, has won several Tony awards and the 2005 Oscar for best short film.

(2) Adigun elaborates on this story in an essay in a book on comedy in Irish theatre, The Power of Laughter: comedy and contemporary Irish theatre, Carysfort Press, Dublin, 2004.

(3) Ryan Tubridy is one of Ireland’s most popular radio talkshow presenters; Peig Sayers wrote an Irish-language autobiography that has been the staple text of the national syllabus in Irish for generations, and has been much satirised as a result.